Plus: she was born overbred, she was raped several times, kept pregs for the purpose of milking her, she had several kids all of whom where taken from her within days, she was fed crap that ruined her tummy, she was sent to the butchers as soon as her udder began to run dry and in the end she was still alive when they slit her throat and cut her open. #justsayin#cecilthelion ﻿

The ban on #Gadhimai means there's a lot of work still to be done to really convince those who honestly believe they need to earn the benevolence of a fictional character by chopping off the heads of nonhuman animals.﻿

PerformanceGurus Staff
New Delhi
Facts:
It is estimated that more than 500,000 buffalo, goats, chickens and other animals were decapitated at Gadhimai in 2009, but in 2014 the numbers had reduced by 70%.
Among others, President Emeritus of the World Council of Arya Samaj and noted social activist, Swami Agnivesh, were at the forefront of urging Indian devotees to

"Classical music in particular has also been shown to aid in the development of better concentration levels. Just last year, a study from the University of London’s Institute of Education found that exposing children to a range of classical music led to enhanced listening skills and the development of increased concentration and self-discipline. A similar study from the University of Dayton found that students performed better at spatial and linguistic processing when Mozart was playing in the background."﻿

Well - you were comparing the nutrient density of a given weight unit of Broccoli to the same weight unit of meat, Manny. But you're not feeding Broccoli to a cow, as you correctly state - you feed her grain or soy. What you fail to get is that you need to feed 16 kg of grain to a cow to get 1 kilogram of beef - so, subtract the usable calories of the grain from your beef calories, and keep the Broccoli out of the equation: 100g of wheat flour have 343 kcal. Now, I dont have the flour to grain ratio, but to be on the safe side, lets assume you need 200g of grain to get 100g of flour (will actually be far better then that), then you'd get 8kg of flour from 16kg of wheat. At 343 kcal per 100g, That would be 27440 kcal versus your 2280 kcal - without all the methane burps, farts and manure lagoons. You just need elementary maths skills for that.And I am talking about the environmental impact as well, which, simply based on basic laws of physics, which you obviously fail (or deny) to recall, has to be by magnitudes greater when using animal products.Pity you muted the post. Yoiu might have learnt something,.﻿

Good news about a successful global effort: #Gadhimai is banned. Thanks to the rest of the 134,000 who spoke out against it, who shared, commented and sent letters to their local Nepalese embassies. Let's target #thanksgiving next. #endthanksgiving﻿

"I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

My professional interests revolve around knowledge and texts and the processes in the course of which they are conceived: reading, writing, learning, and teaching.

As a trained applied linguist, educational researcher and language teacher (German as a foreign language), my core topics are language acquisition, language learning and teaching, German as a foreign and second language and multilingualism.

In my master's thesis ("English as a lingua franca - A simplified code?") I looked at ELF discourse from a systemic-functional perspective to demonstrate the creativity that non-native speakers of a language are capable of. After that, I've worked on modelling and capturing language competence from a quantitative, sociological perspective, investigating knowledge acquisition across the lifespan in a multicohort sequential design project and found it to be a bore. I then ventured into the didactics of writing and writing process research, which currently are my bread-and-butter lines and also pet peeves: I do writing center work at a university and I teach the cultural history of writing and writing in digital environments at a university of applied science; and every once in a while I get a chance to give a workshop on writing-related topics in other surroundings and sometimes even in the "real world".

The bottom line of what I do is motivating people and helping them (find and) harness their individual potentials.

Remnants of my former life in American literary and cultural studies are my (now dormant) interests in the transcendentalist movement and the writings it brought forth (like Emerson, Thoreau, Ripley, Whitman), my interest in Puritan literature, American Renaissance painting / the Hudson River School, Pictorialism and the Photo-Secession. I'd also love to have more time for doing social semiotics again.

Apart from that, I like to think of myself as an environmentalist. Here's from the journal:

"My spirit is in the desperate need of renewal only the woods, hills and lakes can provide. I crave silence for my ears, cool air in my lungs and nature's grandeur for my eyes. Cities will never satisfy like the Earth's tones and what her natural splendor can offer a man weary of society.

Give me birds, not planes. Bumblebees, not armies of cars. Rivers and lakes, not canals. Trees, not buildings. Animals, not human animals. 'Humans are a plague to the Earth', (Attenborough), so heavily tax those who proliferate (Pianka).

The world I live in is a perpetual assault on the senses that distract me from myself. Electronic beeps and tones and clattering rails and ridiculously loud cars and motorcycles and billboards and TV screens and radios and cellphone apps and social media designed to bring me closer to people, but resulting in artificial relations that chip away at my interpersonal social skills. People I once knew or are now am supposed to know have become or just remain little more than avatar faces, spewing characters on screens, corpses in my ever growing contact list.

I live in a world that teaches people that they do not have enough and in which many willingly buy into this lie - and while they're buying, others (unseen) are paying the real price. People think they need more, ever more, more tech, more connections, more friends, more fun. I long for a world that teaches people that they need less, and that happiness lies therein. The woods are such a teacher.

Nature connects me with the world around me in a way that technology never can. I may be able to communicate with virtually any other human animal regardless of their whereabouts on planet Earth in an instant, but Nature offers a mechanism that connects my soul to something more basic, more reliable, and sometimes less treacherous and more fulfilling than human animals. My most reliable connection is my connection to mother Earth, to which soon enough we'll all return."

- Inspection of existing concepts for the support of multiliteral students' language and writing competence, development of a taylor-made concept for Goethe University, Frankfurt
- Organisation, conceptualizing and execution of a scientifically sound workshop program for academic writing; integration of this program into the specific institutional landscape
- Offering individual writing and learning counselling
- Educating and supporting peer tutors for academic writing
- Developing new teaching and learning formats for the impartation of academic writing in cooperation with university teachers
- Offering support and advanced training for academic staff regarding the support of academic writing and reading competence and the integration of writing in digital environments into teaching in higher education

Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences, Berlin

2013 - present

Teaching the cultural history of writing and writing in digital environments in the post-gradual Master program "Biographical and Creative Writing".

Universität Hamburg

2008 - 2013

TU Dortmund

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, 2009 - 2010

Co-designing research instruments for K5 and K9; investigating possibilities for capturing linguistic competence.

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg

Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter, 2009 - 2010

Research Assistant at Germany's National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) - a study with a multi-cohort longitudinal sequence design which tries to shed light on the development of individual educational careers from a lifelong perspective.

University of Hamburg

PhD student, 2011 - 2014

Scholarship within the field of writing process research and the didactics of academic writing. Organization and moderation of a group of scholarship students (teacher students with a migration background) for the Hertie Foundation.